This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to sharing the status of an individual in relation to an emergency.
Emergencies have the potential to affect a large number of people. Emergency responses can be taxing on infrastructures, supplies, and the social fabric. While emergency response crews are responding with food, water, and other necessities, individuals in the emergency area attempt to communicate with their friends and loved ones to find out if they are okay. This communication can be crucial not only to relieve loved ones of worry, but also to relay if an individual needs help or is no longer is danger.
Typical methods of communicating with to loved ones include individualized messages, such as by phone, or direct message from a mobile device. However, these individualized messages are expensive to the messaging infrastructure as they originate from or are directed to the emergency area, which may repeat for each of the individual's contacts and can often cause messaging channels to overload. An individual could notify others through use of a social network to propagate the individual's status. However, existing social networks do not have any means of providing a centralized area to communicate disaster information or to surface disaster information via a stream or notification to help ensure that a user's information relating to the disaster is noticed. Such information can be lost in other news events related to other users.